The Zeppelins of Yesteryear, the Spaceships of Today
History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it comes damn close.
On Aug. 29, 1929, a giant German airship arrived at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey after a historic round-the-world flight. The Graf Zeppelin, a rigid airship that measured 236.6 meters (775.9 ft) in length, had carried 20 passengers and 41 crew members on a voyage that covered 33,234 km (20651 miles) in 21 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes. The flying time was 12 days and 11 minutes as the airship made stops in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Friedrichshafen, Germany. It was fastest circumnavigation of the globe to date.
The public was swept up in Zeppelin fever. Commander Hugo Eckener and his crew received a ticker-tape parade through New York City. It was their second parade in less than a year. The city had honored them in the same way after they completed the Graf Zeppelin’s first transatlantic flight in 1928.
It appeared that Zeppelins might be the way of the future. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh had completed his own transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in a tiny airplane. Now 61 people had cruised around the world, viewing areas of the planet never before seen from the air.
In reality, the Graf Zeppelin’s world straddling flight proved to be the peak for rigid airships. The years ahead would see spectacular crashes and nation after nation abandon them. A decade later, rigid airships were all gone.
Airships had their uses. Germany used Zeppelins to transport passengers and cargo across the Atlantic, conduct surveillance on neighboring countries, and bomb Britain during the First World War. Adorned with Nazi swastikas, the Hindenburg flew over the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The U.S. Navy patrolled the U.S. East and West coastlines with the USS Akron and USS Macon airships.
Rigid airships had their shortcomings. They were expensive and time consuming to build, required sizable crews to operate, and were not produced in very large numbers. A lost airship could not be easily replaced. They couldn’t be quickly rolled off assembly lines like airplanes.
The RMS Queen Mary, which as launched in 1934, could carry more than 2,100 passengers across the Atlantic Ocean. The Hindenburg had berths for only 72 people. Airships appealed to a niche of group of wealthy travelers who could afford to pay a premium to cross the Atlantic in about half the time that a oceanliner would cross it.
Rigid airships didn’t do very well in bad weather. The U.S. Navy lost three airships in storms, resulting in the deaths of 89 crew members. The British R-101 airship crashed while flying through a storm in northern France. The explosion of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst in May 1937 might have resulted from an electrostatic discharge that ignited leaking hydrogen after the airship flew through a thunderstorm.
The Hindenburg disaster was the death knell for rigid airships. The Graf Zeppelin, which was flying back from South America at the time, was the only other airship still in service. It was permanently grounded upon its return to Germany.
A sister ship to the Hindenburg, named Graf Zeppelin or Graf Zeppelin II, flew 30 times without passengers aboard in 1938-39 before it was retired. A second Hindenburg-class airship was never built. The Luftwaffe recycled the aluminum to build aircraft and dynamited the airship hangars at Friedrichshafen. Airplanes now ruled the skies.
Rigid airships became a footnote in aviation history, burned into the public consciousness by the time when one of them exploded over New Jersey. Herbert Morrison’s description of the disaster became a meme decades before the term was coined. Oh the humanity! Oh the humanity, indeed!
21st Century Space Zeppelins
The vehicles that most resemble Zeppelins of old are the suborbital space tourism vehicles of today: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, Blue Origin’s New Shepard, and CAS Space’s New Shepard clone named Li Hong-1. That might seem to be an odd comparison, but they have a number of similarities to airships and one very important difference.
Expensive to Develop and Operate: Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has spent billions of dollars over the past 22 years developing and operating SpaceShipTwo and its WhiteKnightTwo mothership. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has not revealed what the New Shepard program has cost, but it’s safe to say that developing an entirely new launch system capable of carrying people was not cheap.
Few in Number: Virgin Galactic has operated one SpaceShipTwo (now retired) and a single WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft in 22 years. Two new suborbital vehicles are currently being built. Blue Origin has built five New Shepard boosters (two lost, one retired) and four capsules (one retired).
Niche Markets: Like the old German Zeppelins, suborbital spaceships appeal to a niche market of wealthy travelers. Virgin Galactic just raised its ticket prices from $600,000 to $750,000. Tickets for Blue Origin’s New Shepard flights are reported to cost around $1 million.
There are other uses aside from space tourism. The ships have been used for scientific experiments and technology demonstrations that require microgravity conditions. Italian astronauts trained for future orbital missions aboard SpaceShipTwo.
Suborbital spacecraft have one giant drawback: they don’t really go anywhere. Yes, they fly suborbital, and views are…dare I say it?…out of this world. But, the vehicles end up right back where they started. They don’t go to orbit, and they don’t go to Tokyo. It’s more akin to taking a cruise around New York Harbor than hopping on an airplane to Japan.
Point-to-point travel has always been where the real money lies. There have been profitable markets for getting people and goods from one place to another going back thousands of years to the Phoenicians and the Romans. The future lies in vehicles that can reach orbit or quickly fly between distant locations on Earth. Neither SpaceShipTwo nor New Shepard can do it.
Two Companies, Two Paths
At the end of last year, it seemed that Blue Origin was the verge of expanding its New Shepard program. The flight rate had picked up, and new boosters and capsules were under construction.
Then in January, Blue Origin announced it would be suspending New Shepard flights for a minimum of two years in order to devote more resources to the Blue Moon lunar lander the company is developing for NASA’s Artemis program. Returning astronauts to the Moon became the priority.
It’s possible the hiatus could extend beyond 2028 given the complexity of the Blue Moon program. Blue Origin might even decide the risks of continuing to blast people into space on suborbital joyrides outweigh the benefits. What if something goes wrong and they kill a famous celebrity or business person?
New Shepard will have probably served its purpose even if it never flies again. Blue Origin learned how to launch, land, and reuse rockets and spacecraft. It safely flew people into space. The company applied the technologies developed and lessons learned to the orbital New Glenn rocket and the Blue Moon lander. The company was able to land New Glenn’s first stage on the second launch and reuse it on the third flight.
Virgin Galactic is in an entirely different place. The company has flown only a small fraction of its roughly 800 ticket holders. Some of them have been waiting to fly since 2004. They have bought tickets at prices ranging from $200,000 to $750,000.
Virgin Galactic retired its only operational SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, in June 2024 because it was limited to flying once per month with only four customers aboard. The flight rate and passenger load was insufficient for the company to make money, especially since many customers had reserved their seats at lower prices.
Virgin Galactic is developing new Delta-class SpaceShipTwo vehicles that it says will be capable of flying multiple times per week with six paying customers. The first of those vehicles is scheduled to begin flight tests in the third quarter of this year. Commercial flights would follow in late 2026 or early next year.
And beyond that? Most experts don’t believe SpaceShipTwo technology can be scaled up for an orbital vehicle. In 2020, Virgin Galactic unveiled plans for a Mach 3 airplane that could carry 9 to 19 passengers. The company has not talked about the plane in recent years as it has focused on suborbital flights.
The Future: Uncertain
The human suborbital industry is fragile. Blue Origin has its eyes set on the Moon and beyond. It now has a rocket, New Glenn, that can get it there. The company could resume suborbital flights, but it does not need to do so. The flights to the Moon are going to be dangerous enough. Why take the risk of a fatal accident for a brief suborbital flight?
Virgin Galactic needs to fly suborbital. It must do so safely with a small initial fleet of one and later two Delta-class ships. A single catastrophic accident would be very damaging to Virgin Galactic. The company pays the Virgin Group to use its name. The Virgin Group can withdraw that permission if it feels the space company is damaging the brand.
The future of suborbital spaceflight is murky. Like the Zeppelins of old, the spaceships of today could end up as curious footnotes in the history of space travel as humanity expands out to the Moon, Mars and other spots in space.
Very interesting historical parallel. You have a good point: space tourism is extremely expensive and the customer base is extremely small, perhaps too small to sustain a business without other, more reliable income.